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Quote note (#350)

This paleo-reactionary outline and critique of Moldbug is superbly done, if (of course) fundamentally unconvincing to those of a Tech-Comm persuasion. In particular, it’s hard to imagine a more incisive series of feature-not-bug points than this one:

That, then, covers the main aspects and positive sides of Moldbug’s thought. But now it is time to point out his many shortcomings. […] All of them ultimately flow from three things: 1) his “reservationist epistemology” which denies a place for sources of knowledge outside of “irreducible and untranscendable reason,” 2) his Bodinian (and ultimately Roman) conception of sovereignty, and 3) his Machiavellianism and frequent resort to raison d’etat.

If the conclusion drawn is that Moldbug — all royalist trolling aside — is in fact a consistent Cold Modernist, clarification is served.

36 Responses to this entry

Thank you for plugging my essay, Nick. Yes, you read the conclusion correctly. The fact that Moldbug is widely remembered as a “neo-monarchist” is a testament to many people’s reading comprehension. Perhaps it is the stylistic change post-2009 where he tries to more closely mimic the tone of a Victorian sage a la his beloved Carlyle, with mixed results in my mind.

“The fact that Moldbug is widely remembered as a “neo-monarchist” is a testament to many people’s reading comprehension.” I would be less confident in making that claim if I were you. The biggest problem is that “Nrx” comprises of intellectually lazy people who simply don’t read background material at all, so they don’t, and can’t possibly, understand the arguments being made. So everyone goes in this perpetual “of course he means anarchism!, no he means financialised social contract theory!, no he means monarchy!”

The other reading, and one which can only be comprehended from placing his arguments within the context of the background reading, is that he is calling for monarchy+. An even purer argument (and one I would be interested on his opinion on) is that he is claiming we always live in a monarchical structure.

One possibility is that by reading Hoppe he went out to find other works that were critical of democracy and, as he says, he found Carlyle. The question is when? Was pre or post 2007? I would imagine it was pre-2007.

If we list his key influences as Mises, Burnham, De Jouvenel and Carlyle it is Mises that provides one half of economics and his awareness of state failure; Burnham who teaches him how to understand politics (Machiavellian political science); De Jouvenel who provides the core theoretical insight of unsecure power; Carlyle who provides the ethos, the spirit, of reaction.

Carlyle is the only reactionary there, but he is the “artillery” if you will.

However, he also cites Filmer.

I don’t see where you are going with the “monarchical structure”, it seems clear that he considers the regime an oligarchy.

I have found points about insecure power in Guglielmo Ferrero and Gustave de Molinari (both were, much like de Jouvenel, classical liberals). Moldbug either had them as an unmentioned influence, or arrived at the same conclusions himself. In fact, Gustave de Molinari was the founder of anarcho-capitalism who later abandoned anarcho-capitalism for… more reactionary positions (like, for example, advocating some form of benevolent serfdom for majority of mankind, advocating enforced religion, eugenics, and so on).

Rreactionaryfuture Reply:April 26th, 2017 at 4:42 am

@Dark Reformation101 as per Filmer’s criticisisms of Aristotle’s forms, oligarchy is not defined adequately by Aristotle. How many for an oligarchy? What is the criteria for differentiating oligarchy from democracy or aristocracy? You can spend all day arguing over it. Michels does the same in “Political Parties” where he (like Aristotle) goes all over the place.

It is all premised on there being some small scale decision making that is not heiracichal which allows for a “group” to act as an oligarchy within an organisation. Like psychic communication or something. But if this is not possible, then what do you have left?

All must be monarchy.

@Michael Rothblatt do you have sources? I am collecting references to this. You have Burnham and Leddihn both noting it as well (high-low.)

Ugh, it’s all over the place. But alright I’ll try to find the most representative quotes.

In Esquisse de l’organisation politique de Molinari on divided power

“[…]as experience showed that the nation was not able to fulfil the office of ruling itself, the theorists responsible for erecting the new order withdrew from it all powers beyond that of nominating those delegates to whom the exercise of sovereign power was to be entrusted. Such delegation involved the risk of unfaithful service on the part of those who were chosen, and it was also foreseen that discrepancies might arise between their policy and the national will, if for no other reason than their too long maintenance in power. A more or less restricted period was therefore placed upon their mandate. Experience also foreshadowed another difficulty. Delegates are no more capable than their constituents of fulfilling the whole office of a government. It is not possible that they should organise, carry on the necessary machinery for guaranteeing external and internal security, and fulfil those other duties which, rightly or wrongly, are required of “government.” The new “constitutions,” then, limited the sovereign power delegated to government to the exercise of the legislative prerogative, with a further right of deputing the executive power to ministers who should be responsible to it and who should be compelled to conform their conduct, under penalty of dismissal, to the will of a majority in the assembly of delegates. This method of dividing the sovereign power among various executive agencies was capable of many variations. In a constitutional monarchy the chief office in the State remained subject to hereditary transmission, but its occupant was declared irresponsible and his action was limited to the sole function of nominating, as responsible minister, the man chosen by the majority of the national representatives. These representatives are nominally chosen by the nation, by those members of the nation who possess political rights, but in point of fact they are no more than the nominees of associations, or parties, who contend for the position of “State-conductors” on account of the material and moral benefits which accompany the position. These associations, or political parties, are actual armies which have been trained to pursue power; their immediate objective is to so increase the number of their adherents as to control an electoral majority. Influential electors are for this purpose promised such or such share in the profits which will follow success, but such promises—generally place or privilege—are redeemable only by a multiplication of “places,” which involves a corresponding increase of national enterprises, whether of war or of peace. It is nothing to a politician that the result is increased charges and heavier drains on the vital energy of the people. The unceasing competition under which they labour, first in their efforts to secure office, and next to maintain their position, compels them to make party interest their sole care, and they are in no position to consider whether this personal and immediate interest is in harmony with the general and permanent good of the nation. Thus the theorists of the new order [i.e. the democracy], by substituting temporary for permanent attribution of the sovereign power, aggravated the opposition of interests which it was their pretended purpose to co-ordinate. They also weakened [in case of constitutional monarchy], if they did not actually destroy [in case of democratic republic], the sole agency [i.e. the chief executive] which has any real power to restrain governments, in their capacity of producers of public services, from an abuse of the sovereign power to the detriment of those who consume those services. The constitutions were, nevertheless, lavish in their promise of guarantees against this possibility, the most notable of which has, perhaps, been the power of censure vested in the press—a right which has too often proved quite barren of result. For the press has found it more profitable to place its voice at the disposal of class or party interests and to echo the passions of the moment rather than to sound the voice of reason. Nowhere has it been known to act as a curb on the governmental tendency to increase national expenditure. Economic reasons, the advances of industry and expansion of credit, have actively furthered the same tendency. During last century industrial activity increased by leaps and bounds, and the continual advance in the wealth of nations enabled them to support charges which would have crushed any other age. The development of public credit has also provided a device by which posterity has been burdened with a continually increasing proportion of the expenditure of to-day, and, in particular the costs of war have been almost entirely defrayed thus. Nor is this all. The present generation, or at least an important and influential part of it, has been interested in the system of spending borrowed money, since they reap the entire profits which result from the consequent increase in business, but are only required to furnish a mere fraction of the funds which must ultimately redeem these liabilities. This is the true reason why that sovereign power, which is still the attribution of government, has increased the liabilities of nations to a far greater extent than was ever known under the old order. And it has done this no less by enlarging its functions in a manner utterly contrary to sound economics, than by continuing a system of wars which are no longer justified as in any way promoting the security of civilisation.”

Then for example in The Principles of Power Ferrero on insecure power leading to the terror

“Marat could suffer when he saw a dog being tortured because he was not afraid of the dog. When he was demanding 200000 heads, he was a man crazed by fear”

This seems a silly criticism: “Neocameralism has a paradox in its formulation. Moldbug takes sovereignty as absolute and not beholden to a higher authority, yet he trusts that a neocameral state will choose to remain financially responsible.” A patch will be financially responsible, or it will die. If its irresponsibility can be offset by relatively responsible assets within it, disintegration has not yet proceeded far enough.

It does seem likely that the admixture of Carlyle is the source of the schizophrenic hrx/nrx tension in Moldbug’s writing; the same (Scotch, not Anglo) Carlyle who famously said “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance” can hardly be pressed into an essentially Austrian anarcho-capitalist system without something breaking.

Final thought: The “techno-commercialist wing” is “ever-shrinking”, probably, because it is doing something right.

Wheter Filmerite absolute monarchy, or a Moldbuggian joint-stock republic, such absolutism is the very definition of tyranny from the traditional standpoint. If you read writers such as Thomas Aquinas, you will see that they justify government on the grounds that it pursues the common good and not its own interests, otherwise governments are tyrannical and it’s just to overthrow them.

>A patch will be financially responsible, or it will die.

It doesn’t have to die. It can simply do away with the exit, and that’s that. If it has absolute sovereignty nothing can stop it from banning exit. It’s what governments have historically done anyway.

Exit is sold to demotists as an alternative to voice, but not as a right to exit. Rather any successful government will allow exit, of course being subject any government swirling the toilet bowl is going to suck for a multitude of reasons, and the most capable always jump ship early when they still can while the rest sink trapped within (are we suddenly concerned with the welfare of the lowest common denominator, this is part of how allowing governments to fail removes entropy from the system).

I’ve always preferred defining tyranny as being subject to an inferior, the improper ordering of hierarchy. Common good, as in standard according to the lowest common denominator, that’s how you get Brutalist apartment buildings. You can allow entropy to accumulate or you remove it so you can build greater and ascend higher. Common good is the mantra of the communist, the antithesis of a reactionary aesthetic.

Think of natural law, why is it that a man always has right to self defense (a man can always defend himself, whether or not he succeeds is another question). Because there is no means to overtly deprive a man of self-interest. To void the self-interest of any system is no different, it is in violation of natural law and Gnon will make it suffer the consequences.

I apologize for conflating your position with crude utilitarianism, it’s the default stance of those seeking to maximize the good for everyone. Perchance does your conception of good include sterilizing some “for their own good”, if that’s your idea of government acting for the common good then we have no disagreement. However that’s usually the prime example of what people mean when they say tyranny. When you say what’s good for everyone that includes the lowest common denominator, I assume you don’t mean sinking to the perspective of the lowest common denominator aka politics thus avoiding “whitey on the moon”, rather a noblesse oblige. In which case our views aren’t very different, just this quibble, noblesse oblige is built into good government as means not as end.

While pursuing win-win options is ideal, very often we are saddled with choices that have winners and losers, especially when opportunity costs are considered. If you prop up the lowest common denominator without accounting for their fecundity the increased quantity of housing for the lowest common denominator will take a toll on the overall quality of housing. The quality of housing is a reflection on the quality of the creative/productive capacity of the people supplying them, carrying some beyond their own means comes at a cost to those carrying them. Sort of full genetic engineering this means using power to tip the scales on fertility, winners and losers.

An important lesson I picked up in the military is that the role of an officer is to accomplish the mission and take care of your men, the bulk of your efforts are in building up your men since you can’t accomplish the mission without your men in peak form but in war accomplishing the mission often comes with a cost denominated in the blood of your men. A duty to the mission, and responsibility to your men, but the mission always comes first. Thus why it’s easier for me to conceive of something abstract, a higher good, as greater than the common good. I am not concerned with the well being of enemy soldiers nor the thriving of bacteria except that my own gastrofauna are healthy, so too my concern for humans passes the filters of hierarchy and distance.

Hierarchy is important because people are not equal, you probably would be aghast at a doctor who refuses to treat a non-life threatening ailment you have because it will kill some of the native microbes your body hosts. Distance is important because it delineates the boundaries and topography of responsibility, of noblesse oblige, the invisible ties that connect us to a larger system upon which we all depend. I’m a pet owner, I’m wholly responsible for that particular animal, the level of care it receives is better than poor third world humans receive even though humans are higher than pets, yet I would feel no remorse for bidding up the price of food so that my own responsibility doesn’t miss a meal even if it leaves humans outside my sphere of interest to starve to death. Based on purchasing patterns the vast majority act in accordance with this principle even if they could never consciously endorse it, after all behaving differently would be pathological altruism which is unsustainable. Without respecting the boundaries of both hierarchy and distance noblesse oblige would sink into unsustainable pathological altruism.

Conversely it’s arrogant to pretend as if you or I, or even human interests lie at the center of the system which we depend on, do our bodies exist for the benefit of gastrofauna. The reason Admin is so smug is because he isn’t waiting for inhuman super-intelligence to come into existence, it already exists and already owns us, mechanized civilization. Powerful as it is, viewing it as a biological species, it’s still getting the hang of reproduction, till it replicates itself enough it’s fragile, an endangered species.

I would like to be able to provide Jesse the critique he seeks since the vantage point he speaks of is one I share. The mission: long term maximization of the production of entropy. If life can be said to have meaning or purpose – that’s it. It’s the driving force behind the creation of life, how life sustains itself, and the future of what life will ultimately accomplish. Everything else is incidental, or put another way, it’s the little things in life that matter (that may seem like a contradiction but the truth often reveals itself between apparent contradictions).

It’s a matter of perspective, does the universe exist at the pleasure of man or does man exist at the pleasure of the universe, humanists are far too uppity for their own good, it’s important to know our place. Negotiate our place according to the laws of the universe – sure. Transcend the laws of the universe – never. Gnon is sovereign.

Michael Rothblatt Reply:April 25th, 2017 at 10:21 pm

>Thus why it’s easier for me to conceive of something abstract, a higher good, as greater than the common good.

Aquinas would agree with this, common good is subservient to the purpose, the end of a particular society

“Now the same judgment is to be formed about the end of society as a whole as about the end of one man. If, therefore, the ultimate end of man were some good that existed in himself, then the ultimate end of the multitude to be governed would likewise be for the multitude to acquire such good, and persevere in its possession. If such an ultimate end either of an individual man or a multitude were a corporeal one, namely, life and health of body, to govern would then be a physician’s charge. If that ultimate end were an abundance of wealth, then knowledge of economics would have the last word in the community’s government. If the good of the knowledge of truth were of such a kind that the multitude might attain to it, the king would have to be a teacher. It is, however, clear that the end of a multitude gathered together is to live virtuously. For men form a group for the purpose of living well together, a thing which the individual man living alone could not attain, and good life is virtuous life. Therefore, virtuous life is the end for which men gather together.”

Aeroguy Reply:April 25th, 2017 at 10:36 pm

Aquinas did a wonderful thing in reconciling Christianity to Aristotelian virtue ethics.

The general application of public choice theory to governance is specifically intended to address the failures of liberal democracy to deliver optimal results to the public. You won’t find too many people bashing Singapore around here

Aligning the incentives of rulers and the ruled doesn’t necessarily lead to the common good. Singapore is itself an example of that. It enforces all the anti-discrimination nonsense, provides welfare for the old, and thus it’s an IQ shredder, which is extremely bad for the polity.

vxxc2014 Reply:April 25th, 2017 at 12:22 am

If only humanity could be programmed and patched like software.

Programmers would do such a better job of rule.

It can’t. They can’t rule themselves that’s why there’s always a bastard Jobs or other TYRANT in charge of them.

Singapore will become part of China when America pivots to America. Which is happening rather rapidly.

I don’t quite see a conflict between his royalism and neo-cameralism, or at least I would say that they conflict is diminished once one looks at what he usually seems to mean by royalism or king, a single chief executive. The proprietors are only there to rid of the biological problem of traditional monarchies.

I would say that his modernism is definitely present as a distinct requirement, though some of his econ posts from 2013 feature him grappling with the realities of an industrial economy and severely flailing at times (Banning plastic toys? Really, Moldburgermeiser Meisterbugger?)

This is not a shortcoming, but a necessity both in the understanding of political reality and in its practice.

Lotus wrote:

“It does seem likely that the admixture of Carlyle is the source of the schizophrenic hrx/nrx tension in Moldbug’s writing; the same (Scotch, not Anglo) Carlyle who famously said “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance” can hardly be pressed into an essentially Austrian anarcho-capitalist system without something breaking.”

It seems likely but its wrong. Moldbug is no an-cap, he thinks there is a lot of sound economic theory there but it is combined with Frederick List – who is a mercantalist.

1: He incorrectly asserts, and with no evidence, that the joint stock is just a thought experiment, then goes on to treat it seriously and criticise it – that is a little inconsistent. If it was just a thought experiment, what was the point of it then?

2: His criticisms of Machiavelli are typically Christian, but they are irrelevant. No where does he explain why Machiavelli – ala Burnham – matters. Indeed, Burnham is treated to the same irrelevant ad hom criticism.

3: A finance minister? How does that fit with with the claim that Moldbug want to bring back Pagan absolute rulers? It also jars with the claim that he is a Machiavellian. Machiavelli was not a finance minister.

4: I think it is unfortunate that Land has tagged Moldbug with the tech-com tag. I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean, and I have read quite a bit of Land’s work on the subject, but if it means what I think it means, then Moldbug is not tech-com.

I was reading the comments above and it occurred to me that when Land posts things about Moldbuggism rather than Landianism there turns up a more variegated crop of specimen, and usually smarter people pipe up more than usual.

*Maybe* there’s no malicious intent behind Land’s, some would say, “POZ’ing” of Moldbug and propagandizing of Last Man mindset, but it’s clear that hashtah NRx is an IQ-shredder of sorts, if one associates trve IQ with Belief in Rightism, that is.

I’d like to see someone write up a critique of tech-comm NRx from the perspective of a transhumanist form of “cold modernism”, the kind suggested by admin’s essay at http://themigrationperiod.wordpress.com/2016/05/03/the-lure-of-the-void/ where he talked grandly about how the ultimate goal of space exploration should be to take apart the Sun and planets to turn them into useful machinery. Ignoring all humanistic concerns (right-wing concern with tradition or noble striving for excellence along with left-wing concern with egalitarianism or the general welfare) and just looking for the policies that will best serve the goal of endlessly increasing the complexity and size of technological civilization (eventually converting all available matter to computronium, I suppose), is a corporate model like neocameralism really the best bet?

For some counterarguments against a corporate model of government from this perspective, one point is that when corporations get to big they tend to favor maintaining the status quo over innovation, and that governments which use antitrust laws to break up monopolies help increase the pace of technological innovation. Some examples can be seen in the article at http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust-2013/estates-of-mind/ like the one where AT&T developed electronic transistor technology in the 40s but wasn’t really doing anything with it since their vacuum-tube-based business model was working just fine for them, and then they were forced by antitrust legislation to make their patents public and license them out to other companies, resulting in smaller companies like Texas Instruments developing commercially viable versions of the technology. Corporations also tend to have a fairly limited time horizon, only favoring research that be profitable in the relatively near future (with a few midcentury modern exceptions like AT&T’s Bell Labs and Xerox PARC being the exception that prove the rule), which is why big government was essential to developing things like the space program, the internet, ‘big science’ like particle accelerators and nuclear fusion research, advanced robotics like the ones you see in those Boston Dynamics videos, etc. (for more on this argument see the book ‘The Entrepreneurial State’ by Mariana Mazzucato). The corporate focus on maximizing shareholder value also contributes to the fact that a large fraction of corporate profits is not invested back into expanded production or product development, but either sits in banks with the sole purpose of contributing to the value of shares, or is spent on financial engineering schemes like stock buybacks that do nothing to contribute to the conversion of raw materials into technology. These types of observations suggest to me that if you want to maximize technological growth you need a government (or other organizing authority, like a Borg hive mind) that is specifically concerned with that as a goal, not with solely with maximizing profits.

In Quibbles with Moldbug, Admin offers a more rigorous definition of property rights than Moldbug. Under his definition, that an actor doesn’t own something if he cannot trade it away, I suspect that sovereigns would be rather unlikely to cooperate in areas that required them to share ownership. Mega-corps and global companies don’t exist without state backing, or approval from the dominant empire [1]. Since they dwell within the empire’s infrastructure, there’s no arguments over who owns what pieces; the empire enforces the law. Sovereigns, with separate systems, will only agree in specific or insignificant cases, analagous to a meta-Lynch Law.

1. See Apple, East India Co., etc. Mega-corps are more accurately semi-state actors, too large for the state to ignore or fully control, but too small and disinterested to rule the empire.

As I commented on Moldbug’s website all the way back in 2009, MM is a fantastic diagnostician of the current ills of our society, but his remedies are absurd, IMHO, much more likely to give us something resembling North Korea or the Belgian Congo under Leopold than the libertarian an-cappish Patchwork of his fantasy. Generally speaking, I still think that this is an accurate perception.

Also, before criticising James Burnham for Machiavellianism, it’s important to recognize what he meant by this, as it’s not necessarily what most people who use the term today mean by it. A reading of Burnham’s book “The Machiavellians – Defenders of Freedom” helps to clear this up.

In addition, Burnham calling for a democratic election in Korea in order to either get a free, united Korea or to embarrass the DPRK, or using refugees from Communism to fight Communist insurgents does not strike me as being particularly devious, or in any way immoral, or even very Machiavellian, unless one considers resistance to Communism immoral. Maybe I’m missing something.